ARTS, BRIEFLY; National Endowment Salutes Opera

By DANIEL J. WAKIN; Compiled by Lawrence Van Gelder

Published: May 14, 2008

The United States government is honoring opera. The National Endowment for the Arts announced Tuesday that it was establishing yearly Opera Honors awards and named the first four recipients (right, from top): James Levine, the Metropolitan Opera's music director; the soprano Leontyne Price; the composer Carlisle Floyd; and Richard Gaddes, general director of the Santa Fe Opera. Each receives a $25,000 prize. To put that $100,000 in context, the endowment is giving $2.5 million in direct opera grants this year and $7 million in other classical music grants, according to Dana Gioia, its chairman. Total grants to the arts are $72 million, with another $48 million sent to state arts councils to make their own allocations. Mr. Gioia said the awards have an ''enormous symbolic value'' and were established in part to stir awareness and appreciation of opera. While $25,000 could mean a lot more to a struggling singer, say, than to Mr. Levine, who may make more than that for a guest conducting engagement, Mr. Gioia called the prize ''a lifetime achievement award.'' ''If the N.E.A. opera award is going to have credibility,'' he added, ''it has to recognize artists that work at the highest reaches of the art and to create, as it were, a hall of fame of American opera artists. It would be remiss, I think, not to start with the very best.''